


Seas Between Us Braid Hae Roar'd

by beaubete



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-03-09 04:40:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 17,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13473894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: Month by month, Q tears down something that was and replaces it with what will be.





	1. December 2015

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pettikotes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettikotes/gifts).



> This is my entry for the 2017-2018 00Q Reverse Bang! I was so incredibly fortunate to get [pettikotes'](http://pettikotes.tumblr.com/post/170098093335/im-so-thrilled-to-be-able-to-reveal-my-piece-for) gorgeous piece, since almost as soon as I saw it I knew the story it wanted me to write (or maybe just the story I wanted to write for it). I apologize in advance for the anticipation as this is updated week by week; I'm making use of the time to wrap up the last chapters and edit the rest, but I hope you'll find it's worth the wait. Of course in the meantime, you can always head over to her blog to gorge on lovely art!

 

 

Q’s up to his elbows in a project when he makes out the distant sound of knocking, and from the way the man’s eyebrows jump when he opens the door, he must look a sight, too: down to his vest and trousers, smeared with oil and the waxy greenish brown of engine grease.  His hair is standing on end as it is wont to do when he’s tinkering and he’s only in his shop this morning to work off some of the manic energy he’s felt creeping just below the surface of his skin since last night’s escapade in the new building—the almost building, the building that will never be, now, and he doubts C—the cunt—would be grateful to know that’s his biggest imprint on the SIS.  That and a few broken tiles.  Blood stains in the grout.  A shiver works its way up Q’s spine, drawing the muscles tight all the way up his back to rest in a knot of as yet unfaded fear between his shoulder blades.  The man at the door shuffles.

Solicitor, looks like.  Something like.  He wears the City uniform of dark, dapper suit—off the peg but decent quality, brushed gunmetal buttons—and dark, long jacket over it.  Dark brown oxfords, pointed.  His hair is short, smooth, and shines, and Q imagines he’s important somewhere.  He doesn’t seem impatient—well paid, then, and being paid for his time here.  Solicitor.

“Can I help you?” Q asks then.  

“Yes, I’m here on behalf of my client—”

“—James Bond,” Q cuts in, because who else?  Who else could have, would have?  It’s no matter that he’s never told Bond his address.  The name is fizzy-sharp on his tongue.  Acid, dissolving.

“Just so.”  There’s something posh Scots to his accent, Glaswegian—sounds a bit like a presenter for Alba, if he’s honest, and James Bond has gone all the way home for the family solicitor, likely, the ridiculous sod.  “As it’s been thirty days—”

Thirty days, Christ.  Thirty days since Q had stumbled over his words, made the offer to a blank-eyed Bond as he’d talked about Mexico, about missions and _missions_ , about the things you don’t walk away from, can’t walk away from.  Has it already been thirty days?  Has it only been thirty days?  He knows the paperwork in the folder before it’s handed to him; Q leaves a smudged black thumbprint on the page when he brushes the signature.  Faked, of course, but a reasonable proximity to one used by one of Q’s aliases, and notably the one who owns the house he’s standing in.  Owns.  He swallows, rubbing his thumb against the thin knit of his vest to try to clean it enough to take the folder in hand.  The solicitor grimaces, and Q isn’t certain it’s meant to be a smile.

Power of attorney.  The complete ass has given Q control over his life, meted out in documents and forms and letters, all pressed down tight into this slender manila folder.  Somewhere in this folder is Bond’s will.  Somewhere’s the deed to his flat in Chelsea, somewhere’s the title to the Aston Martin.  A marriage license, at least one, he’s sure, and all the secrets in the world.  Q drops it on the kitchen table and goes to wash his hands.

At first, there’s no time to do anything with it.  That’s what Q tells himself: there’s no time, between sweeping up the broken glass shards of the SIS and reshaping the new world order, between days-long shifts and wellness checks disguised as forced double dates with Moneypenny, who sits him down with her boyfriend and a friend of her boyfriend and makes the lot of them eat canapes and drink too much wine in her little flat in Pechkam.   There’s just too much life to pretend to be interested in for him to take the time to force himself to do something with James Bond’s estate.  

And it isn’t as though Bond has died, for all it feels like he has, for all that gaping wound in his chest feels raw and grieving sometimes.  Q could leave it entirely as it is and no one would fault him, least of all Bond himself.  Q had only offered to be a respite, after all.  He’d only promised to keep things exactly the same, and he can’t be upset that Bond accepted.

But.  But the folder is lying there, silent judgement beneath the dust on the unused kitchen table.  He flips it open, turns through the first few pages.  Impulsively jots down a pay rise for the groundskeeper because _honestly_ , Bond, oughtn’t you be ashamed? and touches the tips of his fingers to the official-looking letter legally releasing Bond from any wrongdoing in M’s death.  There’s a sizeable insurance payout in the form of a cheque, enough to do something with, uncashed and due to expire soon, he’s sure, and before Q has quite caught up to what he’s doing, he’s booked the time from work—a week, to assess the state of the place, to gather his wits and his thoughts and the shreds of his heart somehow still tangled in the net there.

He isn’t sure what to pack, isn’t sure what he’ll need.  There were photos, of course, of the aftermath—Bond’s own folder is stuffed with hi-res colour photographs of the kind of wreckage that in a hundred years would be charming but for now just looks like the bombed-out shell of a poky country estate.  Even here there’s a whiff of the old fashioned around Bond: if he hadn’t known for a fact that this damage happened last year, Q’d have thought it was the Blitz.  The destruction isn’t total, of course, and there must be someplace to stay—there’s still a groundskeeper, after all—but.  A week.  He can give Bond one more week of his life.  

He’ll take a jumper, at least, and his heavier coat.  Work gloves, sturdy shoes, a torch—will he need a torch?  Between the auld kirk’s graveyard and the looming ghost of James Bond hovering over his shoulder, he’ll be haunted enough.  The ghosts of Christmas Never Was, Christmas Isn’t Now, and Never Will Be.

Scotland.  Christ, Scotland.  What the hell could have ever persuaded him that this was a good idea?


	2. January 2016

The look on Eve’s face isn’t quite doubting, except that it is.  She doesn’t say that he’s being pathetic, only that she’s sad.  Not for Q, she says, but her thumb rests on the spine of the folder—he’s finally brought it to show her like a cat with guilty present, proud and nervous and wary in one—as if she could fling it from the window without shame.  

“I needed the time away,” Q tells her, and her lip ricks up in wry disbelief.

“Don’t you use my own words against me.  I was thinking Malta, put some colour on your skin.  Not Scotland, not in the dead of winter.  Not going to his house.”

“He isn’t going to be there,” Q protests.

Eve’s eyes go soft.  “That’s exactly my point, darling.”

It’s very good advice, but it’s advice he’s given himself, too, which guarantees he won’t follow it.

::

This time of year, Scotland doesn’t wake until the day’s already running, and even then it’s back to sleep at nearly midday.  There’s a solid seven hours of sunlight if he’s lucky, and there’s little about this that’s been lucky so far.  It’s freezing, too, up here in the winding Highland hills; there’s snow on the ground that’ll be here until Spring peeks her head above the braes, downy and white and sticking.

His hotel is old, nearly Jacobite, in need of renovations and a serious brush up.  His toes were practically frozen when he woke, and he’d hopped on first one foot and then the other, dancing in from of the radiator to put on his socks this morning.  He’s never really considered his central heating at home a bourgeois luxury, but there’s actual rime in the corners of his window and the single radiator tucked under the draughty sill can’t thaw it.

Shirt.  Jumper, heavy cardigan.  Scarf, then anorak, then off with both to fit his hat under the curled-bacon edge of his scarf, then the ends of the scarf crossed across his chest and tucked into the sides of the anorak to lie flat, and Q is glad he hasn’t left this to any later in the year.  His gloves are hot from resting on the top of the radiator, almost too warm except that the warmth flees as fast as he can put them on.  Cold, and it’s only going to be colder onsite.

He’s left the documents on the passenger seat of the little Viva he’s rented for this, at least half hoping they’d be stolen, but no one else seems to want this burden, either.  Q’s stomach grumbles, though whether it’s from lack of breakfast or the nerves that kept him from doing more than swirling his spoon through the lines of milk in his tea until it was all too pale and cold to drink.  It’s too early for whisky.  No matter how much he want it when he looks at the unassuming manila folder.

There’s something sad about the hillside.  It’s aching, hollow despite its loveliness, with the ghostly sobs of the bean nighe all but audible in its glacial dells.  This is a part of the world that’s been carved by ice, still wreathed in fog and misty twilight as he drives the little car through.  Haunted, it comes to him—this place feels haunted, and he recognizes the feeling of ghosts at his shoulder; it’s almost calming, peaceful, then, that he and these hills have something in common: they’re both shrouded in the memory of people long gone.  

He comes upon the stag in the fog like a mythic creature, looming and stark.  It’s early enough the sun hasn’t yet decided to pull itself over the horizon, but the car’s headlights still pick out the name carved there.  Skyfall.  The drive is steep and winding; he encounters the groundskeeper’s house first, but he can see in the distance the looming shape of what’s left of the manor jutting up in the mist like a broken tooth.  He could be too early, but there’s an old man standing just beyond the door of the little cottage; Kincaid, likely.  He sucks up his courage.

“Aye, lad?” Kincaid calls, and then it’s too late to flee.

Kincaid is an old man.  He’s been on the staff since the sixties, knows every inch of the estate backwards and forwards.  He seems satisfied with the small pay rise Q has given him and baffled by the cheque—“What’ll ye do out here with that, then?” Kincaid asks, and Q gamely shrugs.  “Haven’t seen the place yet,” Q replies.  Kincaid nods—and though he doesn’t offer to show Q around, Q gets the impression that Q is a harmless enough oddity.  He doesn’t know what Bond has said about him, if he ever did at all, or if Kincaid just thinks Q’s a page for Bond’s London solicitor or something similarly useless.  

There are old wellies by the door, women’s sizes, and the rubber hasn’t quite gone stiff and cracked with age; thank goodness, then, because Kincaid warns the pond’s not yet frozen through—“Only fully goes a bit later, and then only twice or thrice a year.  Give her two more weeks and she’ll be solid enough for standing on, not that I’d recommend it in your shoes.”—and there are puddles of damp forming in the house.  Give it another year or two like this, Kincaid says, and there won’t be enough to save.

“There’s torches in the landscaping shed by the auld kirk,” Kincaid tells him as if Q would go near it without bracing himself first, “and shovels.  I’m not sure just what you’re after, but if we have it, it’s yours to use.”

A shovel, Q thinks, sounds useful.  As does a torch.  He glances warily at the kirk across the lake and frowns.  Ghosts to visit another time.

In the end, there isn’t actually much to see of the house, though.  Char and splinters.  There’s damp wood rot forming at the baseboards and it’s hard to see in the gloom created by the boards still riddled with bullet holes where they shutter the open, glassless windows.  It’s almost academic, like walking through a museum detailing some tragic past, as Q meanders through the place, careful of traps and bombs that may have been left.  Whatever this place becomes, it’s clear there won’t be much of Skyfall left to it.

Her gloves are on the table in the dining room, and it’s the first time a full chill creeps through the layers he’s wearing.  He remembers these gloves, of course he does.  Folded neatly together on the edge of her desk when he’d met her the first time, when she’d told him he was replacing Boothroyd, when she’d ordered him to arm Bond in those first steps that would eventually prove to be the dance against Silva.  When she’d said he was smarter than to throw away his career, all that promise, away for James Bond.  Though she’d done much worse in the end, so he supposes they were both wrong, in many ways.  It had been chilly, early winter when she’d traveled north.  There’s no shawl here, but he remembers one from the crime scene photos.

His fingers curl against the wood.  What is he doing here?  Just what the fuck does he think he’s doing here?  There’s nothing about Skyfall that’s worth saving.  There’s nothing about this place that’s worth saving.  Nothing about Bond—the thought sticks in his throat.  He leaves.


	3. February 2016

It’s easy to throw himself into work.  There’s always another project to finish, another deadline, another international event, another problem to troubleshoot, until Q finds himself at three in the morning in the canteen, hollow-eyed and thin and aching around a lukewarm paper cup of tea.  He’s tired.  He’s so desperately tired, and still he can’t stop running.

It doesn’t help that London this time of year is drab, grey clouds and grey rivers, grey streets, grey-faced people huddled in their uniform black coats.  For a long week he thinks that Eve must have been right, that someplace tropical and bright could have shaken this dun-coloured cloak of heavy feathers from his shoulders.  He even lets himself fantasise, turns on the sun lamp in his flat that his cats have taken to hogging, and soaks up the gold-orange rays by the watery thin light from his windows and daydreams sand between his toes.  He’s not supposed to let it get this bad—he’s supposed to use the lamp well before he’s had a chance to feel the chill of winter inside, but he’s caught a shard of the snow queen’s mirror in Scotland and now it won’t thaw, even under the lump of Christopher’s furry weight on his chest as he steals the faux sunlight.

So.  Cold.  And dreary, and lonel—  No.  Cold and dreary, and Q’s not a “new year, new you” kind of person, doesn’t even know how to start revitalising himself.  If hearts are houses, Q’s is not a fixer-upper, it’s a tidy bedsit in Hoxton: small and densely populated with one person and two cats.  No room for extra furniture, no room for a roommate.  Vintage wallpaper.  Shag rugs but bare wood floors, shockingly cold beneath the bare foot, even after thirty five years.  He wonders idly what he will do when his cats die—will he replace them, or will his little flat shrink smaller, lose the extra square feet allotted to their sweet fuzzy presence—and ends up choked on his own morbid sadness until all he can do is scoop Blue up from her aloof perch beside his chair, startling Christopher from his sun-drenched nap and drawing a complaining mewl from her.  The softest part of her is her belly, and she’s patient as he rubs his face into it, dries the prickles at the corner of his eyes and drapes her over his head until she flops, purring, and starts to groom the top of his hair, rasping her tongue down the length of a strand to chew at the ends before picking another spot.  

Q goes to work.  No one knows he was weepy the day before; at work he drives himself into the ground with projects and plans, blueprints and never, never going into his actual office for anything.  He makes that mistake precisely once, ducking in to grab a prototype from the cabinet, and wobbled hard, knees going liquid water at the sight of a snowglobe, a jade box, a postcard.  He’d actually light himself on fire if he were to get a postcard now.  His knuckles are white around the door frame until he can support his own weight again; he’ll go back when the thought of Bond—when the thought of what he’d thought Bond could have meant, what he’d hoped Bond meant despite knowing better.  When the thought of possibility feels more like picking scabs than pulling teeth.  Right now a snowglobe feels like a knife tip broken off in the bone, the sharp cutting stab still stinging severed nerves and the cool disregard stuck fast in some hidden, vital part of him, sore in a way he’s never felt before.

“He was never actually mine,” he tells Blue conversationally as she mills around his feet, waiting for her supper.  He’s cruel to hold it hostage so that she will listen to him.  “I never asked, and he never offered.  There was never a point in asking.  I think I always knew it was safer not to.

“But.”  He pauses, and she taps him on the knee with her tidy little white paw.  She looks so solemn.  His mouth stretches and he realises he’s smiling at her, just a little.  “But,” he continues, dipping out the scoop of food as he does, “he knew.  I know that he did.  I know that he knew that I knew, too.  He’d.  Smile?  Just a little one, this wry thing, and I would think, ‘I would move entire mountains for you.’  Just that—with no reward, with no reason.  

“Was I wrong for that?”

She judges him more for teasing with supper than for love.

He thinks someday he’ll throw them out, all the knicknacks Bond used to buy his favour.  Break them irreparably; a daydream of dropping the snow globe from a bridge, film it shattering on the pavement below—send the video to Bond and see if he give a shit about Q and his equally destroyed heart.  Most days he remembers that that’s dramatic.  Melodramatic.  More than he wants, and more than Bond deserves.  He’ll drop it in the Oxfam box, all of it, and it’ll collect dust in a charity shop instead of in his office.  It doesn’t happen, though; Q can never quite bring himself to fill the box, until it, too, sits gathering dust in the corner of his office.  No—that isn’t quite true: he allows himself to put them all away, loads the little box and drafts a text he doesn’t send to Eve if she’ll take them, and instead he ends up lying in bed that night weeping in the way he didn’t when Bond had first walked away.

Q’s brain is sluggish the next morning.  His eyes are swollen and he looks as though he’s actually sick, every inch of his battered heart on his face.  He can’t bear the thought of work in the morning, calls off and spends the day forcing himself to leave his flat, to go to places that don’t remind him of Bond.  Instead he ends up in Greenwich somehow, at the observatory and its line that marks beginnings, endings of time.  It isn’t possible to keep doing this.  It isn’t.  There’s no reason to keep torturing himself, to keep wishing on a star that isn’t falling, it’s fleeing.

It hurts almost as much to realise that he genuinely wants to be over James Bond.  He’s felt—his crush, or perhaps just their friendship, the loose and easy way they’d joked with each other, the burn in his solar plexus as Bond had confessed to feeling hurt that there’d been no place—no one—waiting for him when he’d returned from the dead—and Q had known, hadn’t he, that waiting was what Bond wanted of him?  He’d known deep in the pit of his stomach that he was there for when Bond’s plans failed, for when Bond wanted help or needed comfort, and he’d offered more of the same.

“I can keep it for you,” he’d offered, “while you’re away.  You can trust I won’t sell it under you, that I’ll keep it safe.”  Keep it waiting, he’d meant.  Your life and I, he’d meant, will be waiting when you come back from your adventures.  And Bond had produced documents naming Q trusted, nearly family, capable of acting legally as Bond in almost all situations.  Q had signed them, thinking Bond meant that he was afraid of disappearing, and Bond had instead done just that.  

It’s enough.  Q resolves to send back the papers.  He’ll write himself out of Bond’s story, and some alcove in his little flat will seal itself shut, heart gone hunting for the cask of Amontillado and finding itself tell-tale, thumping from the linens cupboard where the other unused things go.  For now, though, Q dials up the heater, lets the cats into his room to share his pillow and tuck themselves behind his knees, and tries to stay warm.


	4. March 2016

Q forgets.  Not the big things—not the way his lungs burn for air, not his decision and its finality, not the hot salt feel of his disappointment—but the little things.  He forgets to remember.  He forgets to move.  He forgets that breathing is supposed to hurt and that he’s supposed to be distracted, and when he remembers, it’s with a curious little ‘huh’, like discovering a bruise he doesn’t recall marking his leg.  He presses his fingertips to it just to feel the ghost of pain, but all he feels is numb.

He’s not flowering, but the ice is cracking and buds, as they always do, are rushing to make themselves known.  There’ll be a freeze later, crushing and absolute, but for now London is pretending it is springtime, all chiffon blouses and casually short sleeves as people shiver and pretend.  Everyone takes this as permanent change.  They always do.

“You’re looking better,” Eve tells him over coffee in the canteen, and he supposes it must be true if she’s saying it.  He’s been sleeping, at least, and if he still can’t bring himself to actually build them, he’s sketching prototypes again.  “So I’m having a little do this weekend—”

They both expect him to say no.  It’s on the tip of his tongue, but he pulls the corners of his mouth back instead of pursing his lips and “no” sounds like “yes” instead.  “Could be fun,” he tells her, “and I’m getting tired of ready meals from Marks.”  She grins, eyes bright.

::

Malik has been living in the little flat in Peckham nearly half a year now, and at first it feels odd.  Eve’s flat has a masculine miasma in it now, something undefinable and male; he’s watching football on the telly when Q arrives bearing a bottle of red and kissing at Eve’s cheeks like one of her girlfriends.  Malik’s friend—Jeremy, finance, hopeless with computers but good at dimples and flirting with lonely little boffins, because of course; of course.  Eve throws him a guilty little glance and she’s a goddamned spy, so she’s sneaky as hell but not particularly creative.  Q pinches at her waist with clever fingers as she scoots into the kitchen and he follows because his knowledge of sports is  _ dire _ .

“And Taylor?”

“Best not,” she shrugs, because caught out, she can only be open about her intentions.  “I don’t know anyone but you and Malik, and he only knows two gay men, aside from you.”

“So don’t fuck this one up,” Q says dryly.  

“Or do, if you like.  It’s not an arranged marriage; Em’s just tapped on potential fourths for bridge.  Bring one of your own, if you like.”

“My cats don’t play cards.”

Her nose wrinkles and she pinches him right back, right in the squiggly bit of his waist that makes him twist up to get away.  “He’s dead manly, though.  Thought you might appreciate it.”

“No dates more nelly than me,” Q agrees solemnly.  Eve snorts.

He isn’t flowering, but the ice is cracking; he gives Jem his number as he’s leaving and they send each other filthy texts until he’s sated.  When he gets “U up?”, he doesn’t even hesitate, just tugs his pajamas down and bites his lip.  In the morning he orders the background check.  Eve delivers the results herself with a canary-eating grin that only grows wider at the two fingered salute he throws in her direction.

“Don’t read my post,” he tells her, as though she weren’t a spy and he weren’t waving a banner indicating that he intends to fuck her friend.

“How’s Jem?”

“Horny,” Q answers honestly.

“Pot, kettle.”  He grins at that, and she looks like she’s won the lottery.  “No more?”

“Probably not.”  There’s little sense in lying.  She nods.  “Any form of communication not  _ heavily  _ interspersed with pictures and dirty words tends to go a little flat.”

“Well, every sock has a mate.”

“Thanks, mum.”

“Though some socks match freely.”

“Yes, yes, I’m a slag,” he agrees, laughing.  “Though.”  The thought occurs, knitting itself wholecloth as he says it, “Can we do another do at yours?  Or a proper night out?  Not this weekend—I’ve got to—”  Scotland.  He’s got to write Bond out fully before he can try this, but.  “—but soon.  I’m going up to meet with the solicitor this week, maybe next, but after.”

And she’s a spy; she hears what’s not being said.  “Sure, yeah.”

::

“Ah, Mr. Clifford, you’ve beaten me to the punch.  The payment was settled Wednesday, and I was going to come to London to deliver the funds.”  Bond’s solicitor is still in his office, but his clerk is here, a shock of orange hair over earnest face; Q’s eyes flick to the left hand, just to be sure—ringed.  Q takes the hand extended.  

“Actually, I—”

“—And Mr. MacConnall thought it best you took the funds to the groundskeeper yourself, such as it were, since he’s,” here, the boy pauses, clearly searching for a politer way of saying whatever the solicitor’d said, “a bit busy at the moment.”

“Ah,” Q fits in neatly, a stone in the babbling brook.

“And I’m Dougal MacNevil.  Pleasure.”  Dougal’s grip is firm, cheerful.  When he lets it go, Q rubs at the welt of his trouser pocket to regain sensation.

“‘S mine, I’m sure,” Q tells him.  “But about the property—”

“Didn’t take a car, did you?  That’s not a problem at all; I can take you out, if you care to go.  Get me out of the office—it’s such a gorgeous day out, isn’t it?”

“It is.  Unseasonably warm, isn’t it?”  And Q is back on familiar footing—he can talk idly about the weather all day long—but there’s something nice about the thought of pushing that pay rise through, doing some good before he gives up the ability to do so at all.  He nods, instead, and lets Dougal lead him to his car.

“It’s been cloudy all week, it feels like,” Dougal says as they drive, the conversation constant and mild.  Before Q’s quite expected it, they’re cresting the hill and coasting down into the damp brown grounds of the manor.  By the afternoon sun, without fog to hide it, it’s even more a shambles, bits of the wall all but literally falling down.  Dougal whistles.  “Most have been a beauty, though.  Pity about that gas main.  If I’m honest, the Big Man should have ordered an inspection years ago; can’t say I’m surprised it went, in the end.  If I’m honest.”  He says is as though he expects Q to argue, to make explanation, but he’s right—Bond has a history of abandoning things and imagining they’ll take care of themselves in his absence.

Still.  There’s something about the place, some mote of light as it hits the aged stone, some glint from the kirk’s windows, some birdsong half-heard.  Life.  There’s life here, and no mistaking it.  Q feels like Mary from the Secret Garden as he wanders, leaving Dougal to handle the hand-off behind him.  He isn’t ready to go inside, isn’t even ready to peer in the windows, but there’s a bird nesting in the crook of an old stone fence around the kirk yard, and when he ambles over he’s surprised by how vibrant it is.  Q stands, dusting his knees with dirty palms, and looks back to the little groundskeeper’s house.  It’s familiar, this feeling.

Q is a fixer.  Always has been, always will be.  He’s never been able to stand to see something broken, not even his own foolish self.  If he can restore a car from just a steering wheel—and a bit more, he acknowledges grudgingly, though not very much more—he can do this one last thing.  He can.


	5. April 2016

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The keen-eyed may note I've updated the chapter count, and this is because I am not capable of actually counting.

The backs of his legs burn with the pleasant ache of a recent fucking, and Q squirms in the seat of his car.  The drive is long, long enough for him to question what he’s doing, where he’s going, why he’s hiding it from everyone but especially why he’d brushed a hurried kiss across Jem’s forehead this morning as he’d rushed out the door with his overnight bag, pretending there were no questions chasing him out into the hall.  It’s long enough for him to shore up, too, though—he isn’t guilty. He refuses to be guilty.

Jem, though.  Jem has been lovely, those puppydog brown eyes and the enormous, firm hands on the backs of of Q’s thighs as he’d pressed Q back—not a thought for a road trip, Q thinks ruefully.  He laughs a bit at himself, shifts in his seat, turns the radio up. Sings along.

There’s sheep in the fields as he passes.  There are always sheep, of course, but now there are daffodils, Easter flowers nosing bold butter yellow through the clumps of early nettles.  Scotland has shaken off the bitterest of her cold, and lush springtime is beginning to flush over the hills. It all feels so damnably significant, even if he’s never been one to care about all of that before.

And there’s a spray of bluebells in the copse beside Kincaid’s cottage as he crests the hill into Skyfall, dense tangles of vivid blue that draw the eye; thick mats of heather shade the surrounding hills all greens and greys and dusty purples.  Roses knot themselves around the iron fences and now, only now does Q see the brilliant potential of rebirth, some life left in the empty shell. It will be interminable, dragging hard work, but he can see it now in what he’s signed himself up for: this is going to work.

::

“I’d like,” Q says over the steaming cup of strong black tea Kincaid has provided, “to preserve the facade.  What’s left of it.” It’s better than knocking it all down, but it’s still gutting—literally, in this case; he’s had a chance to look closer at the house after another winter’s ravages, and if he leaves it much longer, there won’t be enough to save.  Even so, Q watches Kincaid’s face for a response.

Eventually: “Aye,” and the old man begins to thaw from the stony freeze he’d taken.  “Likely for the best.”

From there, it’s easier.  Q’s got the plans he’d commissioned from a local architect: from dilapidated country estate to charmingly rustic bed and breakfast in only a few short months.  He’ll save some of Bond’s money by doing the floods himself, the decorating. With the judicious leverage of travel sites and a holiday flat let broker, he can put a bit more back into the kitty for upkeep.  Perhaps the place can run itself; well-planned, Skyfall could well outlast them all.

And.  And of course, Q wouldn’t be able to extricate himself from the project, of course not.  Not until it’s done, not for months and months, and while he can tell himself it’s because he wants it done properly, he can’t deny he wants to be the one to do it.  He wants to see some trace of gratitude on Bond’s face, when he lets himself indulge in the wildest of his fantasies, but more than that, he wants to leave some indelible mark of himself on the house.  Something definitively Q, even if it’s nothing more than his name carved and aching behind the wainscot.

But it will be lovely.  It’s obvious from the architect’s renderings, from the skeleton still standing of the grand old house, from the glimpses of heather peering in through the windows and through the craterous hole left by Silva’s mortars.  He traces a meandering path on the map of the grounds and Kincaid agrees; they’ll track a walking trail around the estate for leisure, a pretty garden. The contractor will be by this weekend to survey, and he’ll break ground officially on Monday.

Q stays until MacLeod comes, the burly builder ruddy and buff and brusque.  MacLeod holds no opinion on the proposed repairs himself, simply nods when he sees the house’s thick stone walls.

“Ayup, we can save her,” he intones, and a breath Q’s been holding since he’d first shown his proposal to Kincaid unknots itself in his lungs.  MacLeod describes how his team will bolt the remains of the house’s exterior to a metal frame to hold it up while they rebuild the insides, transforming the weather-worn shambles into a quaint and homely thing.  Clean white walls, a blank canvas without the weight of M’s death or Bond’s childhood to make the place dark with sooty memory.

“And the priest hole?” MacLeod asks, and Q starts.  He’s almost forgotten it; he’d stuck his head in, seen blood stains set by scorching fire, and ducked back out again, too weighted with his own ghosts to allow the tunnel’s spectres to join them.

“Goes to the kirk,” Kincaid adds, and Q can read the wariness in his frame.  At least some of those ghosts are Kincaid’s: a boy—a young man—weeping behind the fireplace, an older woman’s white knuckles on stone as she puts on a brave face.  Q’s own ghosts recognise them; he knows that apprehension.

“We’ll leave it for now,” he tells MacLeod.  He doesn’t yet know what he’ll do with it—possibly nothing—but he can’t bring himself yet to destroy the last place James Bond’s soul may hide.  He doesn’t have to decide now, anyway.

Q won’t be back until after the house is cleared, so this is his last chance to see the walls as they were in Bond’s memory.  He’s already done a sweep to clear the lingering traps, removed sodden wads of gunpowder from the pockets in the floor, from the shattered lamps’ toothless sockets, from the narrow hollows carved behind the electrical switches.  They were thorough, Bond and Kincaid and M—the place would have been a good deal more dangerous when there had been a roof to protect it from damp. As it is, Q is mildly impressed that it hasn’t all burned down already and saved him the trouble.

Here and there, he finds mementos, little reminders tucked like secrets in the decay.  No photos—the cleanup crew would have rescued those and sent them on to Bond in the aftermath—but those little memories that make a home were left to moulder.  A crest carved above the lintel, the rags of an ancient coat in what must have been the hall closet. M’s gloves still on the table, the leather no longer supple but cracking, faded, unmistakable.  He touches them with a fingertip. The pebbled surface is powdery but otherwise remarkably whole, considering.

Dare he save them?  Is there any value in setting them aside?  Would Bond thank him for ripping open again the wounds that had left him staggering, damaged?  Or would he rage at Q for making that decision for him, furious over the protection afforded without his will or consent?

No.  Let Q be the one to make decisions for Bond for once; let him be the one leading instead of following, for once.  Following forever, pining, miserable, lonely, longing, sad.

No.  Fuck that.  Q leaves them.


	6. May 2016

It’s disconcerting, the next time he gets up to Skyfall.  The house has been cleared, the shell of the exterior held firmly in traction but the solid skeleton of the house already laid in, the walls framed and the roof rebuilt.  There are floors that don’t groan under Q’s feet as he wanders the shape of the house, both surprised and impressed at MacLeod’s work. Part of him has been expecting to catch the building dishabille, still somehow still caught between taking off its old face and putting on the new one.  Instead, he can see they’re starting the part of the build that will give him a foundation to work on—literally, he thinks. He’s made a good choice in MacLeod.

At home, he’s distracted, fingers tripping idly up and down the virtual aisles of home improvement stores; he orders tiles and wallpaper to the house, and it’s more care than he’s put into his own home—there he’d moved in without improvements, tolerating the previous owner’s taste until it has merged with his own—but it’s fun, he realises.  It’s fun to plan this, a way to distract himself from the shit the world has been going to and this growing feeling of, well,  _ growing  _ that’s been building.  

Instead, he goes home, and for the first time since starting the job, he plugs his phone in and leaves it where it charges on his kitchen counter.  Doesn’t sign in remotely. Doesn’t mother-hen Fatima and her night team, doesn’t obsessively toy with his blueprints for hours. His head hits the pillow and his eyes don’t burn with fatigue.  He doesn’t dream of shadowy figures but of whether poplar or cedar would reflect the sunlight better. It doesn’t take long for people to notice, but not the way he expects when he realises: his annual checkup reveals better levels on, well, everything, and Eve mentions the growing peace on his shoulders.

She thinks it’s Jem, and it is a bit.  It’s nice being with Jem, where he can completely turn his brain off and flip through flooring samples on his tablet while Jem watches football and lays the flat of his palm over the top of Q’s thigh.  His civilian tablet, the tablet that had lain around collecting dust because Q’s always preferred to carry his secured tablet, the one that could take a thief’s thumbs off if they tried to unlock it without his permission, the one he’s always been afraid to leave on previous boyfriends’ sofas for just that reason.  This one has nothing more sensitive than the banking information for the account he’d put Bond’s money in, and he’s perfectly happy to set it aside on the coffee table when Jem decides that football and window shopping aren’t the only ways to spend a rainy Saturday.

Except.  Except he still can’t bring himself to tell Jem about Skyfall.  About Bond. He can’t give his every weekend to Jem, not when MacLeod calls to ask where to stack the ceramic tiles Q’s ordered to the house, not when Q finds a new home supply shop in Fort William that he wants to visit.  They have weekday evenings, but Jem’s house hasn’t been cleared as safe for overnights and there’s often only enough time for supper and a quick fuck before Q has to go home for the night; his tablet lives on the coffee table when he visits now, carefully and deliberately set aside after Jem’s second sigh.  When Q comes back from the toilet, he’s not surprised to see it in Jem’s hands. Disappointed.

“D’you know,” Jem starts carefully, then pauses, clearly thinking of his words.  “I. Do you know, I thought I’d find Grindr on here.”

As far as condemnations go, it isn’t the sharpest rebuke, but it burns in the backs of Q’s ears all the same.  “Did you think so,” Q says, and the distance he puts into the words cracks between them.

Jem nods.  “I reckoned you had to be talking—you’re so busy all the time.  Not like Eve; I mean, she’s busy, too, but she’s home of a weekend, doesn’t go in as early in the morning.”

What can Q say at that?  It’s at the tip of his tongue to say he does more than Eve, but he truly doesn’t, not now that he’s stopped packing his work up to carry home where no one will scold him for obsessing until the small hours of the morning.  Does he outrank Eve? No, not quite; they’re quite equal, all things considered. He opens his mouth to speak, but there really aren’t words to explain it.

“I don’t—I thought you could have been one of those.  Low libido? Doesn’t like sex? But you suck cock like you’ve trained for it, and you can’t fake those—” Jem considers, then.  “Am I forcing you?”

“No!”  Oh god, Q thinks wildly, this is a conversation he does not want to be in.  “No, I love sex. God, I love sex. You haven’t been forcing me, Jem. Not at all.”

Instead of relaxing, Jem’s frame knots up more.  “Then you’re—someone else?”

And damn him, but Q freezes.  There are so many ways to read Jem’s words, so many ways to take what Jem’s asking.  Yes, and no. No, he isn’t—someone else; he’s been chaste, even with himself, fully satisfied with Jem and his footballer’s body and his jug ears and his sweet burnt caramel eyes and the way he kisses the inside of Q’s knee to wipe his mouth after, as if Q doesn’t know what he’s doing.  He isn’t, doesn’t need to, doesn’t want to.

And with those dark eyes on him, Q can admit to himself that yes, he is—someone else; he is and has been for months, long before Jem and with the kind of desperate hope of the drowning.  He is—Bond, who’s been a ghost between them, blue eyes icy and bland as Jem rubbed at the swelling in Q’s ankles from standing all day, silent and observant as Q’d sucked Jem’s cock, as he’d lain back on Jem’s sofa, spread his legs, let Jem fuck his possessiveness into Q’s pliant body, unaware he was competing with nothing at all.  Q’s breath catches in his throat.

“I haven’t,” Q says honestly, dishonest.

Jem’s mouth turns down at the corners.  

Q’s bag slides across his kitchen counter when he gets home, but for all that his body is performing its displeasure at the situation, he isn’t quite upset.  It’s a hollow feeling, some sort of shock muffling Jem’s words—he was right, Q thinks objectively, that it wasn’t working out; some small part of him feels guilty that apparently it’s been him that’s led someone on, but the guilt is like music in another room, distant and barely felt.  Perhaps it’s the cotton batting he’s wrapped around his heart, gauze and hemostatic bandages to tape up the shards Bond left; perhaps he really is an unfeeling ass. Blue and Christopher greet him in their catty ways and he scratches idly at Christopher’s ears as he pushes his pointy little face into Q’s palm.

Well.  He has a weekend free, now.  Fort William beckons. 


	7. June 2016

Friday morning tastes of ashes.  Of the cigarettes he’d smoked one after another while waiting for a company car to be available as every executive in the building was shuttled out for the night for a few hours’ sleep before the early morning war room meeting.  Academically, nothing will change overnight. Realistically, they’re all spinning their wheels as the sky and earth changed places overnight. He’d been dreaming of ceiling treatments Wednesday night as he’d gone to sleep; he hasn’t slept since.

Brexit.  Like it’s the trendy amalgamation of a celebrity couple’s names instead of a devastating shakeup to the country, to their lives, to the very nature of his job and the work he does to prevent the interference of foreign nations into the crown’s interests.  It’s something sour on the back of his tongue that puckers his mouth alum-tight and bitter. This had felt like a silly nothing the day before; no one would so clearly vote against their own interests. Now he’s forced to face that these are the people he protects.

There are few things that scare him; he’s vainly thought of himself as the thing that goes bump in the night, dreamed that the most dangerous thing that could happen is that there might be an attack somewhere, something more tangible to respond to instead of this skin crawling feeling of disconnect that he feels, sees on the faces of his coworkers, sees on the news in the break rooms because he doesn’t have the heart to order the televisions turned off, no matter how what’s happened sets his teeth on edge.  Neighbours. Countrymen, cowork—no. Not coworkers, at least not now; there’s no one who works at Six who isn’t aware of the shiver of fear that had lanced through the building like a bolt through a deer, sudden and heavy and pinning with the knowledge that things will change.

No, nothing will change overnight, but everything will change.

Q’s busy enough, fielding smugly concerned emails from Langley, less obliquely smug messages from Pyongyang.  Events explode in Syria and he’s forced to steal his agents out of Aleppo as it burns down around them, and there’s just the gentlest tapping at the edges of his firewalls, spiders web-walking in strange circles that seem to ebb and flow with the motion of all of it.  He doesn’t have time to even think of Scotland outside of the context of muted whispers that there could be yet another referendum there, too. His contacts in Five swear it won’t happen, not yet, though mostly they just swear in general. Q swears in general. They all do.

At the end of the week, Q finally finds himself at home for longer than it takes to shower and land on his face.  It isn’t that he’s been shuttled home with an escort; it’s that he’s been threatened with it, and rather than be humiliated by being scooped into the company car by Tanner and the brute squad that’s been sending people back to their houses and away from Six and work and the acrid bite of fear that permeates the halls there, he takes his mandatory leave time and his dignity and a taxi.  Someone, Eve or R or Tanner, has sent the cleaners around, and it’s only a little humiliating that his pants have been shoveled into the basket for hauling to the kitchen; at least they haven’t been washed for him and folded on the bed. Someone, the same someone, likely, has been feeding his cats, though Blue and Christopher swarm his ankles when he gets in, trying to trick him into feeding them again.

Mandatory free time.  Q lies on the bed unable to place himself, unable to orient himself in this brave new world.  The phrasing makes him think of Bond, and he’s surprised by how little that hurts. 

It’s an idle thought: just where is Bond in all of this?  Some distant part of Q wonders if Bond will have to come home as part of this all, unless he manages to marry Dr. Swann?  He almost thinks that Bond will return anyway, King Arthur reclaiming his country when it needs him most; Bond can no more stay away from a Britain in pain than he can any other wounded woman, and if he’s honest with himself, Q has half expected him around every corner since the vote was announced, equal parts hopeful and terrified and expectant.  When will Bond arrive? 

But what would Bond do, Q muses on the fourth day he doesn’t arrive.  The fifth. The tenth, when it’s obvious that Bond isn’t coming back for something as simple as Britain tearing herself to shreds.  What could Bond do, aside from locating Boris and punching in his teeth? There’s nothing any of them can do, and when he’s realistic with himself, thinking with more than just hope and his irrational heart, he thinks Bond might be better where he is.  Let him stay on the mainland where the money is worth something and he has a chance to start over.

But if that happens—if it happens like that, Q knows he’ll never see Bond again.  It’s a bittersweet thought. He drafts an email, then, that he knows he won’t send: renovations on the house are going well.  MacLeod’s sent photos that Q attaches now showing the crisp white walls and the newly repaved fireplace, the latch for the priest hole carefully preserved.  Ideas for landscaping, now the summer sun is breaking through to heat the dales and the heather’s dusky waves have returned. The message is as light as he can make it, nearly hollow, and even then when he reads it back he can hear the wheedling in it: come back.  Come home; be impressed with me. Even now it seems he’s still pathetic; seven months on and he’s pleading as if he actually wants Bond to return to take advantage of him again.

It isn’t enough to delete the draft; Q scrubs it out of the very soul of his tablet the best that he can.  Perhaps Bond will return sometime, he tells himself. It’s hardly the most important thing for Q to consider.  

Everything is changing.  Not just the cyclical regrowth of summer that will die again in autumn, but something fundamental pinning the world up has cracked through.  Brave new world, indeed. 


	8. July 2016

“He doesn’t look a thing like Jesus—”

The music’s loud and Q’s warbling along is louder; he’s been fitting the tiles in for hours in the kitchen, carefully walling himself in for the weekend as he lays the ceramic flooring.  Everything is dusty with plaster and concrete, and Q’s managed to glue his fingernails to the tips of his fingers with the stuff, but there’s beer and the sun is out, has been setting for hours but it’s still out past nine and well on its way to ten and.  And Q is happy. He truly is; he’s been working hard since his taxi had dropped him off at the house to see all the work that’s left for him to do. It’s an honest ache that’s building in the small of his back, but he’s done the wooden floor in the sitting room and the hall, covered them with paper so he could move further into the house, and now he’s laying the kitchen floor, big flats of stone that look suitably ancient when they’re in place.  His saw is still on the counter-cum-workbench, and he’s prouder of the snug way the stone cups the edge of the cabinet than he has been of certain projects he’s done to save the world. 

It’s easy.  It all feels so easy.  He’s torn his vest shifting the stone and there’s a bruise forming down the side of his leg from where he’d slipped on the paper in the hall earlier, but it’s tangible work, easy to do and to see and to gauge its doneness—at his current pace, he’ll only be up to work on the floors another weekend, the painting perhaps one or two weekends, the landscaping and the kirk and the dressing—Skyfall will be done by the end of the year and ready to open by spring.  Q grunts as he hauls another huge slab over.

Perhaps daffodils, then.  He’s half a mind to fill the kirkyard up with roses, just wind off the gate with the things to keep nosy parkers out, let it fall in on itself, but he knows he won’t.  A church is so much more than a pair of gloves, of course, and he finds he doesn’t want to do that, anyway; a little chapel would be such a selling point, and he has to take up the blood stained floor before he can open the rest of it, anyway.  But daffodils, yes, they’d be lovely in the springtime, and there’s nothing wrong with tucking little Scottish primroses down the side of the path. Already the house is transformed; already his mark is everywhere he can look. A Christmas tree?  He could plant—

Q’s laughter is bright, bouncing back at him from the walls with the music as he sits back on his hands to rest.  The beer isn’t cold anymore, but it’s still cool enough, foamy and sparkling and loamy on his tongue; it’s an impulse that takes him to strip off the vest, to scrub at the sweat that’s gathered in his hair with it, until his hair is standing nearly on end and he feels refreshed, scrubbed with sand and grit and polished new.  He sings along with Brandon Flowers between gulps, emptying the bottle before setting it aside. He’ll be done with this room soon, and then it’s on to the next.

He’s bopping along in the first bedroom when he notices he has company, and for a hot moment Q’s embarrassed at being caught out, but Kincaid’s as close to grinning as he’s ever done.

“Remind me of my grandson, sometimes,” Kincaid offers, and Q laughs wryly.

“Sorry if it’s bothering.  I can turn it down if you like.”  There’s grout on his shoulder, and Q nudges at it with his chin in the vague direction of the radio that’s singing loudly about last year’s girlfriend.  Kincaid shakes his head, but Q turns the dial anyway, at least for courtesy. 

“I wasn’t.”  Kincaid pauses, awkward, and Q realises with sudden, crushing surety that this is the moment he’s feared was coming for months.  “I don’t know what’s between ye,” Kincaid starts, then stops. Q has frozen where he sits, palm wet and cold around the neck of a beer.  Like a bad actor rushing his lines, Kincaid continues. “—and I don’t care. It isn’t a matter to me. I thought—Emma, you know—but I’m man enough to say I might be wrong, or if I’m wrong now it doesn’t matter.  

“I wasn’t going to….  From himself.” The envelope is thin, barely more than a postcard; it crinkles when Q takes it from the proffered hand, and Q is taken with the urge to tear it to pieces unopened.  Kincaid looks sympathetic. “I know,” he says slowly, “that something’s passed. I don’t know what—he didn’t say—but.”

But he had said enough, Q knows.  Another letter with Q’s tucked inside; Bond had sent—had said—a hot flush sweeps over Q’s neck and shoulders, sticky.  He nods. The lip of his bottle is cold and clatters on his teeth as he brings it to drink. The hair at his nape has dried standing on end, prickling gooseflesh.

“It isn’t a matter to me,” Kincaid repeats firmly.  “You’ve done a good job here. You’ve done a good thing.  I wasn’t going to.” The gesture is limp now when he points at the letter.  Unflattering, then, whatever Bond’s said. Q swallows against the burn of carbonation, alcohol.   The paper crackles like fire when he opens the envelope.  Bond’s handwriting, instantly recognisable, as immediate as a punch in the gut.  Q sees Kincaid escape down the stairs and lets him; they’re both humiliated enough.

“Q—” the letter begins.

“I’ll admit I was surprised, but Kincaid’s photos”—he’d sent photos, and Q marvels at himself that he didn’t see that coming—“look good.  I shouldn’t have been. You’ve always been good at bringing the dead back to life. I’m curious what made you decide but it’s clever and very you to repurpose a broken old shambles into something useful and new,” and Q laughs; it isn’t even subtle metaphor.  He doesn’t want to be charmed. He is, helplessly. 

“I’ve been reading in the paper what a lot of trouble everyone at the office has ahead and have enjoyed the beach instead, ha ha ha.  You must send me a letter with what you will do next. Send it through Kincaid or through Moneypenny—she has my address here in Bern,” and Q swallows, because of course he’d left ways to reach him with people, with others, with people who are not Q, “and she can get it to me.”  Don’t ask for the address, is the unspoken instruction. Q is the keeper of things meant to be the same, things meant to wait. “Let me know before you get to the kirk.

“—James Bond”

As far as missives go, it’s both opaque and clear: no sign of Bond’s feelings, but ending on a command: don’t touch the kirk.

The sun’s gone down outside, he knows, the temperature plummeting.  Perhaps ten, maybe even fifteen degrees cooler than an hour ago; the hills have sucked the late sun’s warmth inside themselves and even without cooling there’s a chill that dashes between the open windows to dance and lift the little hairs up his arms.  Numb. Q is numb.

He shouldn’t have started the project without contacting Bond first.  It had occurred to him at the time, but he’d started anyway, and now he feels cold, caught halfway between mischief and surprise party, secret spoiled with the warm good mood of the day.  

Spoiled.  Q finishes his beer in silence.


	9. August 2016

It takes a long time to come back.  Of course it does; when Q finally slinks back into the house he finds that the better part of a month has gone, London caught in the dog days of a summer that make him break out in prickles of sweat and peevishness.  Scotland has become a balm, somehow, somehow cool and misted panacea. He takes tea with Kincaid and then sits in the empty parlour, on the floor he’s lain with his own two hands, and breathes with the motion of the planet.  When he closes his eyes and concentrates, he even imagines he can feel it up the center of his spine, forever and ever tipping slightly to the left as the whole Earth moves with a whipping speed that presses him flat with wonder.

It takes strength to stand against the force of that speed, and he does.  When Q pulls himself to his feet and meanders his way upstairs, he’s a little surprised by how little the memory of Bond’s letter hurts as he passes that first finished bedroom.  Instead, he surprises himself with thoughts of the next one; another hall and seven rooms or so to go and he’ll have finished the floors, and there’s pride in that. 

There’s pride in all of it, if he’s honest.  There’s pride in the crisp white walls he hasn’t painted yet, in the little plastic runner down the center of the unfinished hall, in the stacks of boards waiting for him to lay them in the rooms.  There’s pride in the dead bee on the sill where there was no window last year to stop its escape. There’s pride in the way his vest sticks to the center of his back while he works like it’s been glued there.  There’s pride in the ache of his muscles. If.

Q’s flat on his back in the middle of the finished floor of his third bedroom this visit.  He ought to be packing himself up to go; he’s expected in the office in the morning, and the drive down will be brutal with the fatigue he can feel forming tight and high in the top of his thigh and the joint of his hip.  Still. The world is quiet, Scotland’s sunny evening gone golden and contemplative. There’s a peace here that fills some niche in his soul, and he’s not surprised to know Bond has somehow missed that about this place, though if he’s honest it could be another of Q’s own creations, something he’s brought and added, something that’s snuck into the house from beneath his skin, rather than the opposite.

He loved Bond.  It’s something Q’s shied from, mentally, something he’s known theoretically for a long while but been reluctant to grasp the full weight of.  He did. Perhaps he still does; he certainly knows that Bond leaving isn’t a thing he’s likely able to ever forget, though—that moment his heart had cracked, then swelled around its wound until there was no room in his chest for anything but the blood leaking into his body and the disappointment that had grown like a sponge as it drew in that blood, made it bitter and sad.  He knows just as well that if Bond had ever known, it hadn’t mattered a bit to him, and that’s oddly freeing—his attempts to please Bond hadn’t failed because he was not pleasing, but because Bond had not cared. His constant melting and repouring himself into new shapes for Bond’s comfort had not made him natural in Bond’s eye because there had never been room for him there.  With the distance and calm that he can draw from the patient floorboards beneath him, Q can wrap his head around the fact that Bond had not returned his attention because he was incapable, not because he was oblivious, and if Bond had been hurtful, it was only because Q had put those weapons into Bond’s hands himself so hopefully.

It’s sobering.  It’s been a long time coming.  The discovery is still a cut, sharp and sparkling, but it’s lancing infection, and now he can press here, at the memory of the little smile he’d hoped Bond reserved for him, to feel the ache of past pain but no sharp stab of swelling.  He can press there, at the memory of the late night conversations over the comms when the world was asleep and they were the only two people alive and there is no burn, no knot of foreign shards of glass healed over, invisible but still stabbing.  

When he’s ready, he lifts his phone over his head.  He hasn’t done this—he doesn’t do this; hasn’t had a reason, hasn’t had anyone to send it to.  It takes a couple of tries to get it just right, the spill of his hair on the boards he’s just snapped into place.  He’s lingered longer than he should and the sunlight is no longer just golden but amber, sun starting to set behind the hills.  He’ll be driving all night at this rate, may even need to call to beg off work in the morning, but he sends the photo with a tag attached: “new floors”.  

Perhaps he’ll get a response.  Perhaps he won’t. Perhaps Bond has changed his number, or perhaps he doesn’t care, or perhaps he’s blocked everyone from his old life at Six except Moneypenny.  Perhaps he’s blocked Q specifically. It really doesn’t matter. They’re nice floors, and Q’s not pulling them up even if Bond whinges about them; he’s not destroying his hard work for someone else’s preferences.  His heart is a grenade and he’s not letting Bond blow him up anymore. If.

If.  He lets himself think it for a moment, a long one.  If this place were his, he wouldn’t have to worry about what he’ll do when he’s done.  There’s a room on the north face of the building, almost too small to justify letting but just the right size for a single man to escape from the city.  It doesn’t have floors yet, but he finds himself drifting into it when he’s between rooms, the little dormer looking out over the heath a sight he could be used to seeing.  Too small for Bond to bring Dr. Swann to, and he finds he’s at least as fierce over the thought of Bond in it as he is of Bond bringing someone else to this place Q has built.  It is his space, adopted in his heart despite the fact that he holds no ownership of the place beyond what Bond has given him. He’ll never afford Skyfall, not in a thousand years working at Six, and he’d never leave London for good anyway, but.  But the morning sun hits the heather, peeking out from the east to wash the hills grey and green and purple, and. How like Bond to leave something lovely to rot. The flowers will bloom without him.

Time to go.  At least for now, and he can come back—not next week; he has to test a new prototype when the city is quiet—er, at least—but the week after, perhaps, to wrap up the last three big bedrooms and his own.  Then walls—he can paint at a rate of perhaps five, six rooms in a weekend if he works efficiently and moves between them as they dry—and then furnishings, and then—

He checks his phone.  Just a glance, just to see:

“Looks good :)”


	10. September 2016

Q returns to Six in chaos.  They’ve lost another batch of nationals to foreign extremists, and the US and Russia are circling each other like wary dogs, or perhaps jackals, more aptly; they’ve both scented blood and are within moments of ripping into one another over Aleppo’s carcass.  Ceasefires negotiated and betrayed, and bombing the likes of which Q hasn’t seen in his own short lifespan, the entire ancient city scraped off the map. Syria herself is shattered, barely enough left to justify trying to stave off the vicious, snarling fight that’s happening over it—and yet of course there is.  Of course there’s enough to justify it; if even one person is left in the shambles Q sees when he reviews the footage, it justifies doing anything he can, anything at all possible, anything anyone can.

The mood is grim.  There are other things happening in the world, of course there are; they’ve slipped Double-oh Four into the President’s circles in the Philippines because there are people, more people every day, who disappear from Manila as though they never existed; North Korea has begun firing missiles into the sea as though the panic other countries are causing is drawing too much attention away from them.  Q’s sent out more junior agents in the last two weeks than he can recall arming in a month, and the body bags have begun coming home.

Eve sighs from where she’s leaned against his desk.  Technically, Q knows, she’s meant to be home. He doesn’t know what she’s told Malik for her absence lately—she’s been here at the office every day he has, and his only excuse for leaving was to refill the automatic feeder before skulking back to the couch in his office—but he knows she’s meant to be home right now; he’d overheard while hiding from M to avoid the same speech she’d received.  Instead they’re armed with tea and whisky and watching the rubble of one of the oldest cities on Earth through the shattered lens of a body cam to know whether the crew that’s meant to be arriving will be medical evac or corpse retrieval. The screen gives a last juddering shiver and Eve swears. There almost isn’t enough left in Q to feel grief.

“Call it,” he tells her, tipping his chin at the desk recorder.

“Call it yourself, you vulture.”

“We’ll leave it for the retrieval team, then,” he agrees.  She slugs back her mug and takes his own, daring him with her eyes to say something.

“Is there even a place on this planet that isn’t absolute shit right now?” Eve asks him.  It’s metaphorical—that’s why they’re doing this, after all: to protect those places it doesn’t make sense for them to send agents.  He understands what she means, though: just once, he’d like to watch one of those places on the screen instead.

“I still have the painting to do,” Q offers instead.  “It’s nice this time of year. Not cold yet. I’d better get on it, though, or the paint’ll never dry.  You’re welcome to come with.”

Eve pauses, considers.  “No, I don’t want to be part of this creepy—whatever it is.”

Q hums.  “Creepy? Is it?”

She looks at him as though she’s never heard the language he’s speaking.  “Darling, anyone else would have given up. Instead, you’re building him a house.”

“It isn’t about him,” Q protests.  The elegant cock of her brow tells him she knows different.  “It isn’t.” Not anymore, but there’s enough truth in her words for him to burn.  “I have to. If I don’t keep—” He stops. There’s something about this that sits in the top of his chest, something as heavy as truth.  There are fourteen yellow cord welts around the toe of his boot, and he can’t bring himself to say it aloud to someone else, can’t force those words out of his mouth.  When he looks up at her, she knows. “I’d hate him instead. Isn’t there enough of that in the world?”

Eve sighs again, then turns to fill his mug again—whisky, this time, then enough tea to warm it.  She passes the mug over and waits for him to finish draining it. “It isn’t. The opposite, you know.  You could try for indifference.”

“No, I can’t.”

“No.  You can’t.”

Her lipstick is waxy and warm against his cheek.  “Go home, boffin dearest. You look like shit.” His grin is weak.

By the time he manages to get away from a world melting into disaster, it’s been long weeks since he’d last seen Skyfall.  Q isn’t sure Kincaid doesn’t believe he’s lost his taste for it, but they meet as usual for tea and chatting about the place. Kincaid has found a niece, or grand-niece, or great-grand-niece somewhere who’s willing to take on the role of housekeeper, once the place opens for business.  Q’s picked an arbitrary date: early December, early enough that they’ll catch the visitors for Christmas and Hogmanay, and hurtling quickly at them. They need a cook to run the kitchen since both are food holidays, and it’s getting close enough that Q can’t pretend it isn’t time yet. He’s wary of adding other people to this haven, but if he delays much longer, he’ll have to work the place himself—impossible.

The inspector’s by while Q’s there this time, the first time he hasn’t missed him; between finishing the painting and finally framing their license to operate, it’s beginning to feel done.  He’ll order the furniture down from Fort William; Kincaid will oversee the delivery, and by the time Q makes it back, the house will be everything but styled. The landscaper will be by next week to draw a plan, and then.

He’s meant to tell Bond.  It’s the only part of this whole thing he’s objected to, and honestly, Q’s taken tremendous liberties otherwise.  It’s the only part Bond’s cared enough about, and no wonder; Q’s cleared the creeping grass back from Monique and Andrew Bond, made the stone more visible.  Clipped back some of the invading rose vines, but otherwise hasn’t touched the kirk.

But at the same time, if he tells him, he’s sure Bond will say no, and that’s not acceptable.  He can’t just board it up and let it fall in on itself, not the way Bond wanted to treat the whole house.  It’s too grand, too present for that. He can’t just leave it to moulder on the edge of the grounds. It’s not an option.

Still.  Still. He can’t make up his mind: rebuild, remove, reject? Disregard?  He ponders it the whole of the long drive home, and by the time he’s in bed, Christopher lying on his arm and Blue between his knees, he still hasn’t decided whether—or how—he’ll betray Bond’s trust. 


	11. October 2016

Add nothing.  Take nothing away.  In the end, these are the rules Q sets for himself to justify his interference.

The month starts warm, one last hurrah of summer, but the heat belies trees in the hills gone soft and hazy gold.  Wildlife at Skyfall is small, the stag and the elk and the greater beasts hunted out of existence by generations of Bonds.  There’s grouse, though, and there’s something autumnal in their chittering calls from the grass. He idles the day perched on the end of the narrow single bed he’s put in his little garret, watching Kincaid and his hound pacing the grounds, kicking up the fowl and bringing them back down again with his gun.  Q’s not surprised when he looks up from tucking in the last pleated bed sheet corner to find Kincaid inviting him to tea.

He’s grown accustomed to this, in many ways.  Kincaid is gruff but grandfatherly, in a way that Q doesn’t really recall from a grandfather he barely remembers.  The company is familial—Q’s as familiar with the kitchen sink in Kincaid’s cottage as with his own in London when he takes their dishes from the table to scrub up.  He recognises the signs of someone left too long on his own, he supposes; the company, quiet and contemplative as it is, does them both good.

“Nearly done, then, are you?  I nosed around the other day,” Kincaid admits as he pours them each a whisky.  

Q nods, tapping out a cigarette.  He offers, but Kincaid declines. “Dressed the beds for website photos this morning.  A little bland, but I’d imagine it may take some time for the house to feel lived in again.”

“Didn’t much before, if I’m honest,” Kincaid confesses, “these last thirty, forty years.  There’s more life in the old place now, if only for the people coming and going these days.  She’ll find her voice though, don’t you worry.”

Q hums around the paper butt of his cigarette, thoughtful.  “Perhaps so. And I’ll run it for you, of course—the website.  Even after—” They both know what ‘after’ means. After Bond comes back, whether he lets Q stay on or demands he go; Q can no more imagine leaving the task to Kincaid than he can imagine leaving his position at Six to R.  “I’ve been playing with website concepts, booking systems. The site photos, like I said. I’ve compared to other sites and even had a friend take a look at it for me.”—Taylor, amused to hear Q’d spurned Jem despite his own disinterest in rekindling between them what had been at its heart a few lacklustre handjobs and the acknowledgement that a switch was a switch and a vers was a vers and two bottoms probably wouldn’t ever become either.  He’d ripped gleefully into the demo Q had assembled, leaving instructions for improvements and an offer to be paid in blowjobs for more advice, should Q want more help; playful sex with no expectations or strings attached—Q’s tempted to ask just for that.

Kincaid is watching him, one brow raised, and Q flushes all over.  “A friend,” Kincaid says, voice heavy with irony, and Q manages to go even redder at Kincaid’s laugh.

“Taylor does real estate,” he explains.  “Some big firm in the city. He had some great tips about making the launch successful—it was his idea to get the place open for Christmas, for instance—even if he only shared because we’re outside of his market.”

“And because of his altruistic heart,” Kincaid adds wryly.

“Oh, yes, that too.”  Buried in Kincaid’s easy, teasing response: ‘he’.  The quiet acceptance, overt where before now it’s been only implied, makes Q’s eyes burn.

He’s brought along a sleeping bag because he doesn’t dare actually claim the bed, but the floor is cold despite the clanking of the radiator and somehow, he finds himself draping the bag over the bed and slinking in like a repentant lover.  Just this once, this one time alone, and he’ll never do it again; in the morning, he smoothes the pillow with a hand and pulls a loose curl that’s worked its way into the case, embedded.

The morning has broken cold, crisp enough to firm his resolve.  Buckets first, lemon oil for the pews and the altar, and a stiff brush and salt to purify and scour the stains set into the cracks in the floors.  Newspaper and vinegar for the ancient, crumbling leaded windows. A shiny new chain and lock for the spaces beneath, the priest hole’s tunnel too scarred and sacred to be polished up with a chamois.  By the time he’s done hours later, his knees are sore from kneeling in supplication but the place faintly glows.

He spends the afternoon outside, fingers un-pruning and the late October weather still warmer than the weight of regrets bowing the rafters inside.  Warmer than the bucket of foamed and filthy water carrying the last moments of a woman like M, the last dregs of a beast like Silva, the last tears of the man he’d met days before they were shed and thought he’d known for it, the three of them joined, fluid, forever.  Q dumps the bucket behind the kirk. All three are dead, and at least two were a fiction to begin with.

But it isn’t as though there’s nothing to do in the kirkyard.  Wild grass has run unruled across the scrabble of plots for long enough to set up deep roots.  He spends his time first weeding between the rows and then trimming cautiously. Q’s Anglican in the way most people are—Christmas, maybe Easter if he isn’t too busy or tired or working, every other year or so—but something still squirms in his gut at the thought of digging into the decades-old graves.  He tidies, grooms, straightens what crooked stones he can, their weather worn fronts little more than faceless slabs. He’s still extricating a long-dead sweetbriar as the sun begins to fade.

“Motherf—”  The wound is ragged, ripped across the ball of his thumb and down, nearly into the soft meat of the mount of Venus.  It’s already dripping readily, a runnel of claret that he chases first with the tip of his tongue and then with the dirty rag of his handkerchief, used as it’s been to catch sweat from his brow.  The salt stings, but not nearly so much as his embarrassment.

Best to leave the gardening to the landscaper.  His thumb throbs against the wheel for his entire drive back, wrapped in a cleaner scrap of bandage from Kincaid.  This isn’t something he’s good at, Q muses, but he could learn—he could string this project out another month, two.  Eventually it would be too cold for gardening and he’d buy himself...what? Another three months? Four, at least, nearly five with Scotland’s weather.  He could string this renovation out, could keep finding excuses—

Done.  The house is done enough to open, the landscaper coming during the week while Q is back in the city putting out international fires, the kirk—  He can feel the moment his pulse picks up, burning in the center of his palm. There’s no putting it off: he has to tell Bond.


	12. November 2016

He beats Bond to Scotland, train unexpectedly quicker than traffic and quicker still than the generous time he’d granted for the train’s typically late starts.  A long evening, made longer by a late morning; the sun’s awake before him by more than an hour, forgivable only because he’d been trapped in his berth on the train, arriving finally at almost ten.  Now he’s been perched on the edge of the bench nearly an hour, eyes trained on the horizon for anything familiar, butterflies and snapping crocodiles tangling in his stomach, fluttery cramping that’s already sent him once this morning to the toilets to splash water on his face and mutter at his reflection in the mirror.  

When he’s honest, Q has no idea what he’s going to do.  Just the thought of seeing Bond again is like a bruise inside his ribcage, protected from healing by his very bones.  He wants, desperately—what? To see him? To never see him again? To catch a glimpse of Bond’s face and know—yes. He wants to know, more than anything.  To know what to expect, to know how he will respond, to know whether he’s lied to himself these months about whether he’s over it. Then he catches the familiar glint of sun on silver in the car park and his knees go watery and no, he doesn’t, isn’t ready, can’t possibly—

Seeing Bond again in the flesh, both the same as he was before and tremendously different, is.  It’s the knowledge of it, more than the sight of him, that hits Q like a sledgehammer to the chest, bringing his heart to his throat until he can taste copper blood and feel his pulse lifting the skin of his throat.  He wets his lips and the corners of Bond’s eyes crease.

“Bond.”

“Q.”  It isn’t mocking, except in that gentle way that Bond always is in fondness.  Q’s hands curl involuntarily around the strap of his overnight bag, and Bond reaches for it.  “Let me take that.”

The ride from Fort William isn’t long, but it’s as though suddenly he’s never taken it before, gaze drawn to the window like a magnet.  Anything to avoid looking at the empty car, the wood and steel and leather that carries now only its own quiet masculinity and the distant trace of Bond’s aftershave.  He casts his eye, flicking below his lashes, back at Bond’s knuckles on the gear shift. Bare. His stomach clenches around his breakfast. Some of it must translate into the pulled-down corner of his mouth because when he dares glance back, he catches Bond sneaking the same peeks; each of them realises he’s been caught, but Bond laughs first.

“She’s in Italy, somewhere, I think.  We haven’t seen each other in a few months.”

“I didn’t ask.”  It’s surlier than he’d meant it.  Q pulls himself from the window reluctantly, smiling wryly.  “Not really my place. Either it was a bad memory or she’d show up eventually.”  Bond hums.

“Not really bad,” Bond says.  His fingertips drum the wheel as he drives; in another man, it might be a tell, but Q knows Bond almost better than he knows himself, or at least he knows the man Bond used to be.  He’s just thinking, putting words together before he says them. They’re both of them dancing around the topic, the elephant in the car so wide between them that Q can feel the handle of the door digging into his hip.

“Have you had a chance to—” Q starts as Bond decides on, “I arrived last night—”  Tangled, they’re talking about the same thing from different directions. Q lets Bond continue.

“The place looks good.”  It doesn’t quite take the tension out of the air, but Q can feel it precipitating, dripping into a quiet sort of acceptance.  “I didn’t think it could, not really,” Bond confesses. “I mean, I knew you were doing a fine job, but. I didn’t think it—” he doesn’t say the name of the house, or if he does it’s covered up by the gentle shushing of his hand on the dash as he strokes over the other thing Q’s lovingly restored for him.  “Could.” It has the air of finality: Bond had thought Skyfall so tainted as to be unsavable. The thought curls Q’s lip.

“Mostly I just threw your money at it.”  It isn’t true, or not quite, but Bond’s bark of laughter at that is pleasing.  

“I hear tell you laid the floors yourself,” Bond leads.  Q gives a half shrug—play down the amount of work, as always; they aren’t yet to a place where he can tease about the literal months of work he’s put into Bond’s house, and part of him wonders if they ever will be again.  Bond is quiet, eyes on the heather as they drive. Then: “Thank you.”

“And the—?”  Q wants to know.  Doesn’t want to know.  Bond’s chin dips in acknowledgement, and suddenly Q can’t hold back the words: “It’s only I knew—know—how important it was to you, so I tried to be very careful.  You told me not to and I did anyway, but I couldn’t leave it undone, you know? I didn’t—I cleaned, scrubbed the floors, you know, got the bl—the stains out and polished everything up.  It took ages, but I’d like to think—”

Bond’s thumb rubs at the seam on the steering wheel where Q had repaired the damaged leather.  Hours of careful stitching; he’d tracked down the appropriate leather, a fine grain kidskin so dewy soft he’d only wanted to touch it through the barrier of driving gloves.  He’d researched the sinew to use so that it stretched with the leather in the heat of Bond’s palm, dedicated himself to the careful, surgical stitches until the tiny raised bumps where the leather butted against itself were nearly raw enough to cover with bandages, as if the skin could heal around the shapes of the wheel and the welting of the seats.

“I’m not going to fuck you for repairing my house, Q.”

The viciousness of it hits him harder than an open-handed slap, just as sudden and cruel.  Bond’s mouth is a thin, grim line of satisfaction as the air that’s still in Q’s lungs escapes in a wheeze.  That isn’t—“I thought—” but he doesn’t have breath to continue, and Bond must misunderstand, because—

“You’ve done a masterful job, even at the parts I didn’t want you to.”  Bond’s laugh at that is bitter, and he scrubs at his face with the palm of his hand before pushing it up to shove his hair back.  It’s longer—not long enough to be considered long, but flattering; it’s a flattering look; Q hates himself immediately, deeply, for noticing.  His mind whirls. “I know what you thought, Q, but I have to say—”

The shell around Q’s lungs cracks.  “I thought.” His voice is rougher than he wants, drier, tighter, higher; he sounds as stunned and wounded as he feels.  Still, he shoves at Bond’s accusation, physically pushes at his arm until Bond actually looks, all vengeful eyes in shattered face.  “We were friends, goddamnit. That’s—I thought we were.”

“Friends,” Bond says, as though he’s never heard a word he believes less.

“Oh my god.”  He’s never felt so—been so— “I’m going to be sick.  Pull over—stop the bloody car; I’m not vomiting in—oh god.”  Q’s knees wobble hard as he staggers out, but he doesn’t fall.  He’s been the biggest fool. When he’s done he feels sour all over, stomach turned and eyes sore and dry.  He cannot face Skyfall now. Cannot. Will not.

Bond stays until the cab arrives, the engine of the idling car—the car Q has made him, pointed in the direction of the house Q has made him—throbbing hot against Q’s back as he leans against the door from the outside.  He doesn’t meet Bond’s eye when he goes. If the cabbie finds it odd to pick someone up at the side of another car, he doesn’t say—doesn’t remark on the smell of sick or the tracks of silent tears on Q’s face that he’s long given up on scrubbing away.  Just takes him dutifully to the train station, then on to Inverness when Q changes his mind at the thought of another twelve hours on a train. The car is silent.


	13. December 2016

The phone rings.  He’s meant to be in Scotland; this number’s meant to be unlisted.  He doesn’t answer.

Heartbreak feels different this time.  Q recognises it, for one, when the burn sits just beneath his lungs and beats at his ribcage from the inside, keeps himself busy in healthy ways.  Visits Eve, but accepts no offers for more double dates; develops newer and ever stranger tech for the office but does not bring it home. Does not accept Taylor’s offer or go on the pull, but wanks quiet and efficient in his bed.  This time heartbreak feels dramatic, performative almost—he sits like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief. Was not this love, indeed?

Opening day at Skyfall comes.  He hasn’t been told otherwise—he opens reservations on the site, and when the first reservations file in, no one tells him otherwise, either.  The first day he gets a review—“clean, a little remote, but lovely and the staff very kind”—he files his conflict of interest form; he’s not employed elsewhere, but he does work of a similar nature outside of Six.  Tanner takes it with a wry smile—“We already knew you were compromised by Skyfall, you know.”

Q does.  He’s never been subtle about his love, and apparently not subtle about his goal with the remodel—or at least not to anyone else but himself.  Bond had seen through the mask that had hidden it from Q immediately. It’s sobering: he misses Skyfall. He misses the hard work and the place to go outside of the city when he’s feeling overwhelmed and heartsick.  He misses the glow of the heather in the late evening light, misses chats with Kincaid over tea and whisky in the little cottage. Misses thinking of Bond, softly, in the dead of night in Bond’s childhood home. He wonders how he’d overlooked that part: he misses Bond.

The first postcard comes in, postmarked Inverness but showing Brussels, and he throws it in the bin unread.  Doesn’t let himself retrieve it before dumping in the remains of a spagbol, doesn’t let himself weep after taking out the rubbish.  Doesn’t let himself think on it at all, eyes and heart and resolve hard as diamond until the second comes and he shatters, brittle glass.  This, he can’t throw out—Nice, and he can trace the path Bond took to run from him and all of the other things waiting in England for him. He can’t bear to read the tiny, dense writing, shoves it deep in a drawer and uploads the photos Kincaid’s sent of the grand opening.  The walking path is lovely, and there’s a new maid grinning widely in the photos, the cook Q’d had time to hire, Kincaid’s niece with her apron smudged, Kincaid himself smiling as much as he ever does. Bond’s nowhere to be found in the photos, until Q realises with a shock: Bond’s the photographer, each image framed with Bond’s eye.  Another positive review comes in on the site. They’re having some sort of do for Hogmanay—“I wish you’d come, lad, and I’ll put him off to Fort William for the weekend,” Kincaid adds, and Q misses him too, fiercely—with fireworks and perhaps a bonfire, promises of charming Highlander traditions that fill the rooms on the site quickly with a mix of tourists looking for rustic charm and locals flooding away from the cities’ bigger crowds.  He knows what he’s called that little room; he books it before he has time to think better.

Christmas in London is clear, cold and blue as church windows.  He spends the day alone, pops in for the evening to visit with Eve and give her a bottle of champagne she’ll use to celebrate her engagement later when Malik finally has a chance to get her alone; for now he justifies the expense to her with “it’s Christmas!” and kisses all around.  Christopher and Blue get dashing new collars, as they always do, and he certainly doesn’t sit down with an entire plum pudding to himself and get soused on brandy sauce. It’s quite normal, at least for him, the routine of the single and lonely settled like a mantle across his shoulders.  He turns on his sun lamp and pretends he’s in Malta.

He’s booked a flight, car waiting for him in Inverness.  He doesn’t dare give himself a whole drive to consider turning back, doesn’t torment himself with an overnight train ride to remember in.  He’s told no one he’s coming. Bond meets him at the airport anyway.

“I’ve parked in long-term.”

“Good thing you know where your car is,” Q bites back.

“Let me ride with you.”

“No.”  It isn’t as airy a response as Q wants, but his stomach is flipping with nerves.  Bond’s soft, engaging, and Q regrets a fistful of postcards banded together in his desk drawer where they can’t hurt him, safely declawed and unread.  He doesn’t want Bond to pretend to be his friend, can’t bear the hope that he isn’t.

“Please.”

The little Viva is affordable, the cheapest option on the rental’s website, compact and familiar; Bond fits into it only with some crumpling.  He doesn’t let Q load his own luggage into the boot, doesn’t let him open his own door or close it. Hovers, Q realises, uneasily. The car starts with a sound more sputter than growl.

Perhaps a mile or so from Skyfall, Q breaks his promise to himself.  “I think you should know I didn’t read your cards. I didn’t—I suppose I knew I’d see you today, but I didn’t want to.”

Bond swallows, the click of his throat audible.  He reaches over, turns on the indicator and then the hazard lights, clearer than words: he wants to talk.  Q obeys. They sit by the side of the narrow road carved from the hills by centuries of tramping feet. Bond swallows again.  “That’s fair.”

“There’s nothing fair,” Q tells him.  It’s petty and blithe, but it’s true. Bond nods.

“Aye,” then, as though embarrassed, “Yes.  You’re right.”

And.  And. And Q can’t stop himself, any more than he ever could; he knows Bond’s stopped them for some purpose, some thing he needs to say, but Q needs—“You were right.  I wanted you to be grateful over Skyfall. I wanted you to see what I did and realise that I’d thought of you, perhaps every day—nearly every day—for months. That I—” And.  “And you’re right, too, that I wanted you to fuck me. God, that one was never even a secret with you, was it? Really? When I followed you around moon-eyed and waiting? Certainly it wasn’t when you’d.  You’d wink at me and I’d fall to pieces, give you anything and everything I could, damned near everything you asked for. Even I knew you knew. Even I saw what you were doing.”

He spares a glance at Bond, unable to risk himself for more, and Bond’s gone still.  The curve of his jaw is taut, the curl of his ear quivering with tension. He’s staring out the window; Q blinks and looks away, back to his fingers on the steering wheel, back to safe.  “I know,” Q says, and it’s so, so careful, “that you use people. Used. For a living. I know that; I’ve always known that. I just refused to believe it was me, too.”

No denials.  The tension leaves Bond’s frame in a wave.  Then: “I wrote the first one when MacConnall sent word you’d received the papers.  I wasn’t sure—I wanted to remind you of what you’d promised, I suppose. I wrote it all up—but then, you haven’t read it?”  His eyes flit to Q, and Q shrugs.

“I threw it out.”

No apology.  Bond’s lip curls, and he wets it.  “She said it was cruel. Sending it.  It was about some clock shop we’d visited—the stairs were like they’d been carved into the building as though it were an old tree, everything particular and just so.  I said thank you for minding my place while I was away; I talked about needing to leave to get my head on straight. Madeleine was aghast.

“That was her word: aghast.  She was aghast that I’d think of sending something like that, after.  She didn’t know, the trick with the car—” as though it had been a playful prank, “just.  She’d seen your face, in the aftermath. During the situation—”

“In Austria,” Q corrects.  He knows the moment Madeleine saw it in his face and fools himself not at all that it took her longer than thirty seconds to suss it out.

“In Austria,” Bond agrees.  “It was. Cruel. It took someone telling me no for me to see it—to care that I was being cruel.  But then you didn’t return the file. Kincaid told me when you visited the first time—I’d been hoping never to think of the place again.  I wasn’t kind, when I told him you could do as you wished. And then you kept working. You told him what you were going to do to save it, to rescue the house—from me, I suppose, though I wonder if you ever thought of it that way.”  He had. Bond continues. “You sent me that photo—” A hot flush steals over Q’s face at the secret smile tucked into Bond’s lip at the memory. “You—

“I looked forward to your updates.  To photos from Kincaid after you’d left.  I was—Madeleine had already gone by that point, and.”  Here, Bond goes quiet. Q has a visceral fantasy of Bond, the photo he’d sent, and goes pink straight up to the tops of his ears.  When he looks up, Bond looks ruffled, too. 

“I wrote to you again.  I don’t—I never meant to send it.  I just wanted—the first draft of that card was so long it spilled over into a notebook.  I still have—if you destroyed that one, too; I’d like. I mean, even if you destroyed them all, I want.

“I couldn’t deal with myself, after that.  I was building you up; I’d already started to come home, sold off the house in Switzerland, sent boxes for Kincaid to store so you wouldn’t know I was—I.  

“The first thing I did when I got home was visit the kirk.  I don’t—I haven’t even been to her grave; I skipped the will reading.  She wasn’t in those places. But by the time I got home….” There’s something ragged about Bond’s grief, rent and damaged as the man himself is calm.

“She wasn’t there either.”  Of course not. Q’d scrubbed her right out, dumped her behind the kirk in the tall grass.  He swallows. “I don’t care, you know. Why. It isn’t an excuse.”

Bond’s brow beetles, a retort forming on his lips, then he relaxes.  Shakes his head. “You’re right.”

And.  “I did it to take power.  Away from you,” Q confesses.  “It was a power move. I’m sorry; I knew it would hurt you.”

Bond’s laugh at that is quiet.  “We’re certainly a pair.” Q’s smile is only a little bit bittersweet.

They’ve been sitting so still for so long that the first sizzling pop takes Q by surprise, flashes of pink and golden sparks falling over the hills.  He checks his watch: gone eleven, nearly the new year. Kincaid and his staff will be handing out mulled wine and cider as Skyfall’s guests huddle beneath the show; there’s a full house tonight, Q remembers with a puff of pride.  He and Bond watch the sky bloom purple and red and brilliant white.

He gets Bond home shortly after the last of the lights has burnt itself out.  There are cars, a little gravel patch for parking on; Kincaid is still out when they step out, pulling stakes from the ground where the rockets had been set.  He nods, wary, and Q raises his hand in greeting. Q lets Bond let him in and muscle memory takes over; he’s at his own room’s door before he realises he needs the key in Bond’s hand.  He drops his bag on the bed—his, bought and paid for for the weekend—and turns back to Bond, who takes his hand. His palm slips a bit against Q’s own.

“There’s a tradition, at the first—at Hogmanay,” Bond says, and Q can hear him rolling the name on his tongue, tasting the memory of it.  “It’s called first footing.” They’re at another room, the door cracked to show the shadows of the corner of a bed. Bond backs against the door, brings him with.  “An old kind of Scottish witching: the first person into the house sets the luck for the rest of the year. Unluckiest is a red haired woman, but luckiest—” The corner of Bond’s mouth twitches.  “Tall, dark, and handsome.”

He’s being led again, Bond directing and Q meant to ask, “how high?”.  He hesitates, and doubt hangs again in Bond’s eye. Regret. Acceptance.

“If—?” Bond asks, pauses for reassurance, and.  Yes, it’s just enough. Q turns them, kicks the door open with his heel and steps across the threshold.  Bond follows. Q can hear his breath in the dark, see by the glitter of his eyes as he closes the door behind them.  He stops Bond’s approach with the flat of his palm against Bond’s chest. 

“Supposed to be a stranger, isn’t it?” Q asks wryly.  If there’s anything Q is to this house, it isn’t a stranger; he feels the bed he’s built at the back of his knees, the floors he’s set underfoot.  Bond’s shadow nods, then shrugs, the gesture half guilty. Q understands.

Bond’s breath is wobbly with nerves and laughter against Q’s face.  He’s warm, so warm at Q’s front, and when they touch, this, too, is tradition.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for sticking with me as I posted this one, often off schedule and almost always late when it was. I cannot say how much I've appreciated all of the lovely comments and encouragement; I can only hope that it was worth the wait and that the ending is satisfying. Thank you, and until next time.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Robert Burns' poem _Auld Lang Syne_ , which you may be familiar with as a New Year's Eve standby in most of the English-speaking world. The full line follows:
> 
> _We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,  
>  frae morning sun till dine;  
> But seas between us braid hae roar'd  
> sin' auld lang syne._


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